This piece comes from an extended poem centered on the Northwest Coast Fur Trade.

Most people won't know what that was. When the book came out a bookstore buyer expressed disappointment at having ordered copies. "I Ihought it was going to be a sex book!"

Ed Dorn generously contributed a preface, bits of which which might help out here with the drawing of the larger picture.

"In the American westward expansion . . . the search for peltry [skins, furs, 'soft gold'] led the way before all other exploitation––mining, ranching, land hunger. The Pacific Northwest was the last of the late-eighteenth- and early-twentieth-century frontiers, and it is still 'the last frontier.'

"Empire of Skin is the recapitulation of the greatest hunting enterprise of the millennium, which brought the grounding and mapping of what is now demarked by the geopolitical term 'Pacific Rim.' The story encompasses the somber pursuit of prolific creatures [beaver, otter, buffalo, bear] irresistible to a race born without the hats and coats necessary for surviving extreme latitudes. This was the last great raid on nature before nineteenth-century advances in chemistry began to break out the chains of synthetics, allowing the masses a measure of warmth and affording the comfortable, morally opportunistic condemnation of the wearing of animal fur.

"[Empire of Skin] is a beautifully founded document. It is created with a poetry that carries the authority of the full modern tradition. Its exactitudes of diction generate and inform the imagination. It is only such poetry that is capable of saving such extensive cultural memory from the decaying vortex of history."

I spent a long time (years) trying to imagine him, in that situation. He did his best to make do. At one point he was even "given" a wife. But much always remained A=L=I=E=N for him, there. He had continual longings to be back among "his kind". One can't wash one's longings of that sort out of one's hair the way one would wash the vermin out of a shirt, there in the lake, by the praying place. Come to think of it laundry and prayer make a fair association. These things were important to him, trying to keep his soul clean. That may have proven a losing battle.

washing was the biggestdeal

Your trick of in-feeling gets right to the heart of this, I think. Intuition unlocks as many secret historical doors as data. The data anyway is pretty spotty when you have only the one written source, and one understandably affected by lingering cultural disposition and prejudices at that.

The state of longing can be home, can be what the traveler seeks. It is a thrill, addictive. Love. Do you think his alien self was H=I=M=S=E=L=F? (sorry, it is so tempting to go on and on with the equals sign...)

Absolutely lovely poem and photos. You are the master, Tom. I've been dipping into the book but concentrating first on Sleepwalker's Fate, having loved your sobering and delightful Dorn, Céline and Berrigan books these last few weeks (and waiting for more).

Well I picture Big Foot country another century/Crowded with giant green men and loneliness/Bottomless homesick lamentations/Keep on surfacing one less clean shirt/So many Bostons no fine sane harbor/No fun hide 'n' seek so far from kind and sundry little feet/God's mail undeliverable to savage deer till/A palimpsest addressed to tomorrow's poet-clerk/Found asylum in the poet's current post and comments.

The voyagers to that coast came to buy otter skins for teapots. They hadn't known the natives were far more sophisticated at trading than they could ever pray to be.

The equals sign must have been stamped on their sails. It must have had a terrible hold on them, must have put them under a kind of spell.

The poor interlopers. With their hideously tiresome anthologies, their utterly humourless self-referencing, their odious conferences in honour of themselves.

Jewitt hadn't meant to be there. He didn't want the wife. He couldn't get over the unpleasant odours. To a native of course the odours would not have seemed unpleasant at all, in fact probably the reverse. They had their own excellent hygiene. The very cold salt water, the seaweed sachets, the never wearing any pants.

He was becoming more feral than he might have wished. His unedited Diaries reveal what the Official Narrative Constructed Later in Connecticut by the Publisher did not.

Ironies are always a bit tiresome, but there's no avoiding the irony in the fact that it was neither iron nor gold but copper -- all those teapots & kettles & c., hammered and pounded out into sheets to become the #1 value commodity in the potlatch exchange system -- which was the death sentence of the beautiful sea otter, the one creature in this whole complicated web of relations that could be said to be truly innocent of everything.

Thinking of ED, brass would also apply... it was well known that if hospitably invited aboard ship, the natives had to be watched every minute -- and somehow even the vigilance did not prevent the discovery, once they'd left, that the brass buttons on all the officer's dress uniforms had mysteriously gone missing. For the guests were both more and less ingenious than the hosts.

While the otters swam round the ship harmlessly, preparing for extermination by means of "the trade". The white-eyes left the risks and skills of the killing to the native hunters, who were so much better at the job; after all they'd been doing it forever; but just not at the ramped-up volume of "harvesting" encouraged by the Yankee traders on the ships out of Boston. At Nootka a little bit of cheapjack copper bric-a-brac could buy you a dozen or maybe a hundred otter skins. The trading ships went on then from Nootka to Canton, where one otter skin could bring $100. The top mandarins valued otter skin garments very highly. As well they might have, for the fine thick fur of this remarkable deep diving cold water swimming animal was like nothing else in the world. Something like 6,000 hairs per square inch. The fur of a river otter (for example) has no more than a fraction of that density. The "soft gold" of the sea otter, one of nature's marvels. And you know white world business will always make off with those, not infrequently seducing the native peoples into colluding in this attrition of their most precious traditional resource, simply for the prospect of short-term goods-exchange show-off-system profit. Greed is always the easiest of human vices to exploit.